


Gift of the Magi

by artyartie



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Hair, Odin's Bad Parenting, Post-World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 01:24:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artyartie/pseuds/artyartie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christmastime in London, 1922. The Goddess of War is now its student, The God of Mischief still has familial issues. Flirting in Latin, holiday spirit(s), and simple gifts abound.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gift of the Magi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anayim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anayim/gifts).



 

London, 1922

“I try telling my father finding a husband, like I wanted to one anyway, isn’t an easy business these days.”  Sif shook her head, a few more flakes of snow drifting to the sidewalk, already dusted in white.  Damn, it was cold, and even if the wintry weather should have made her cheerful, it just made her wish for a parka, if it could only be as sharp as her maroon crushed velvet coat with fur collar and cuffs.  “Hardly any men at all it seems, after the war, and I’m not lowering myself to fighting over one.”

“Not as if you wouldn’t win,” Jane said.  Jane was a slip of a thing, physically, but mentally the woman could run circles around Sif.  Einstein too, if she ever met him.  Tutoring pampered brats in the ways of simple physics was beneath her.  “Even if you had to fight your would be beau.”

“You and your cheek,” Sif said, cuffing Jane across the shoulder.  “Though there has to be a man out there who likes that, even if he can’t understand anything else you say.”

“Romance!” Jane laughed as she tugged at the door of her favorite bookstore, the warmth inside rushing out in a balmy breeze.  “Who needs romance when you have science?” 

“I’ll have to settle for my Clausewitz,” Sif replied, wondering how she came to prefer pages of battles to the prospect of love.

 

***

 

Jane was a lovely girl, but Sif was happy with a bit of solitude once their shopping was done.   Tucked away in a little pub near the Strand with a steaming beef pie, a pint of cider, and a copy of The Gallic Wars in translation tucked in the crook of her elbow, she could hardly be more content.

“ _Salve_.”  Oh, perfect.  An idiot who remembered enough of his Latin primer to mock her.  Sif pulled herself out of the blood and muck of Gaul and into a pair or startingly blue and warm eyes.  

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, his voice warm, not at all mocking.  Or not yet.   “It’s just that Caesar’s one of my favorites.”

“He’s delightfully straightforward,” Sif said.  “Not like that old windbag Cicero.”

The man held up a gloved hand to his chest.  “Now, now, dear Tully might be a bit long-winded, but he has some beautiful turns of phrase.   _Si quis in caelum ascendisset naturamque mundi et pulchritudinem siderum perspexisset, insuavem illam admirationem ei fore; quae iucundissima fuisset, si aliquem, cui narraret, habuisset._ "

“I think I only understood half of that.  It’s been a while since I’ve had to use my Latin.”

“It hardly seems like that’s possible.” A hint of color coming to already reddened cheeks, and his voice broke in a flustered stammer.“I mean, you don’t seem very old.  That’s to say…”

Sif laughed, setting down the book and motioning the poor thing to sit down.  “If that’s flattery, I’m afraid you’re very, very bad at it.”  What she did not say is that said fact endeared him to her all the more.

***

 

His name was Loki Odinson, and beneath his careful pronunciation she could hear the brusqueness of a Northern accent.  He had a slight limp, dragging his left foot, and she could see a pale white scar beneath his lip.

He dug into his own pie with gusto, then seemed to remember his company.  “What’s a girl like you doing, studying about war?  Not that girls can’t study war, or shouldn’t, I just don’t see why anyone would want to.”  One hand dropped below the table, rubbing at his leg.  “It’s a damned awful business.”

“You were in the Great War.”

“Is it so obvious?”  A wan smile tugged at his scar.  

“I was a nurse.  Not a very good one, I think, but I tried to cheer the men the best I could, the ones who looked like you, just younger.  Who were scared and frightened and trying to be men when they were barely more than boys.”  Her finger traced along the rim of her glass.  “Somewhere in that mess I decided if I wasn’t very good at fixing people, I wanted to be good at understanding why we’d all go to such ruin on a grand scale.”

“And have you?”  He didn’t look put out, like some other lads who’d been in the war, but seemed far away, like he was back in the trenches, back in no man’s land, back wherever he’d come by the scars, the ones she could see and all the others.

“Have I what?”

“Deduced why we humans insist on blowing each others brains out at least once a decade?”

Sif smirked as she sipped at her cider.  “The more I know how, Mr. Odinson, the less I know why.”

 

***

 

He had a little flat, not far off Notting Hill, and so he’d insisted on seeing her that far, even if she wouldn’t let him walk to Mayfair and back in a damned blizzard.  

“Are you certain you’ll be alright?  Can I call you a cab?  Or a dog sled, perhaps?” 

Sif laughed.  “I think I can manage.  Besides, I’m hardly in a hurry to be home.”

“Ah, yes.”  Loki’s blue eyes radiated sympathy.  They’d both shared their family troubles over another few pints.  Sif’s overbearing father, who didn’t understand his daughter wanting to better her mind, not marry whoever offered the best prospects. Loki’s thoughtless father hardly won any awards himself.  He’d sent two sons to war and told the survivor that he’d been the wrong one to come back.  “You would be welcome here, though if you haven’t even bobbed your hair for not wanting to cause a scandal…”

“My father should throw a fit.”  Sif smiled and bowed her head.  “Maybe then studying war would seem positively harmless.” 

“Well.  As the Romans would say,” Loki said, taking her gloved and raising it to his lips, “ _Audentes Fortuna iuuat_.”

 

***

 

Sif didn’t know how she found her way to his flat, through the haze of memory and the snow swirling in Hyde Park.  Anger, however, was a better coat than mink.

“See you’re having a Happy Christmas,” he said, openingthe door, a tumbler of something caramel-coloured in his glass.

“A few of those and it might be less miserable.”  He raised a toast and motioned her inside with a sweep of his hand, setting his drink down long enough to slide the white-flecked grey wool coat off her shoulders.  “How many is that for you?”

“One.”  He shut the door against the cold, steered her to a couch strewn with books and half-filled sheets of paper.  “Seems I was waiting for company.”

She at least set the papers aside before she slunk into the plush cushions.  The room was cluttered, to put it nicely, yet it smelled like him in all the best ways: leather and ink and a hint of tobacco.  

“My family tried to give me a drunken, sodden wreck of a peer for a husband,” Sif said, not even waiting for the drink Loki was pouring.  “How’s that for a Christmas gift?”

Loki winced and added another splash of whiskey for good measure.  “Sounds as good as the one my father gave me, which would be the priviledge of not calling him father anymore.”

Sif sprayed her just-sipped whiskey across the table.  “He what?!  First he wishes you died in the war, now he disowns you?”

“Not exactly.  Turns out I was a foundling they took in, passed off as their own.  So more rectifying a long-standing falsehood that was weighing on his mind.  Since my mother-”  He smiled, brittle, and sank into the seat besides her.  “Since the woman I thought was my mother died, he’s become even more enjoyable.  So with that, Happy Christmas,” he said, clinking his glass against hers before he tossed it back.

Sif snorted as she sipped at her glass, trying not keep the liquor in this time.  “We should have a happy Christmas, if just to spite them.”

“Merriment as revenge?”  The tightness in his jaw eased, and a genuine smile flickered at his lips. “Was it Clausewitz who taught that, or Jomini?”

“We’ll call it the Sif Doctrine,” she said, feeling a warmth that had nothing to do with the booze beneath her skin.  “From the state of chaos it’s safe to say you’re lacking in servants?”

“If by lacking you mean I can’t afford to employ one, yes.  There are some tins in the kitchen.”  He smiled crookedly.  “Some may even be edible.” 

“Excellent.  I may have been miserable at stitching up patients, but I learned how to make something out of nothing when it comes to food.”  Sif slif out of her blue satin sheath, pushing her white sleeves up past her elbows.

“If you’re making us the Christmas feast, what am I going to give you, poor as I am?”  Loki raised an eyebrow, twirling the glass bemusedly in his hand.  “I’m no wise man, I’m afraid, and certainly not a shepherd.”

Sif chuckled as she reached for his hand.  “I’m sure we can think of something.”

 

***

 

“This was not exactly what I thought you had in mind.”  Sif could hear the hitch in Loki’s voice, his damned hesitation.  She sighed and loosened her hair, letting auburn tresses cascade down her back.

“We both know you have some talent.  I’d rather you do it than a stranger.”  Sif drummed her fingers against her thighs.  “Well? I fed you, now it’s time you did your part.”

“It’s just that, this is my first time, and this is somewhat permanent.”  Sif felt a steadying hand on her shoulder as Loki continued to prevaricate.  “I couldn’t bear to have you angry if I did something wrong.  Also, I think you may be quite the terror when you’re angry.”

“I promise, I will try not to draw blood, if you do the same.”  Sif chuckled.  His hands drifted up, tangling in her hair, and she sighed.  She lifted her hands out of her lap, and pressed the shears into his grasp.

“Just cut my hair like you did those paper crowns, and I think we’ll be more than even.”

 

***

 

“I’d say you should have done this years ago, except I wouldn’t have had the honor.”  Loki’s hands stroked through her hair, bobbed and framing her face in soft wisps.  “It looks beautiful, though that’s more to do with you than any skill I have with the shears.”

“Piffle,” Sif said, leaning into his touch.  “But I appreciate the flattery nonetheless.”

“Hardly flattery if it’s true,” he said, fingers tracing her ear.  “This Christmas was going to be worse than any of them in the trenches, and now you’ve made it…”

“Something marginally better than Yuletide in the mud, I hope.” 

“Far, far better,” he murmured, lowering his lips to nuzzle lightly at her jawline.  “So much so I don’t want it to end.”

Sif turned, reaching up to cradle his face, then to pull him down for a kiss.  Sweet, careful, then with increasing passion and ardor, hands grasping and entwining at each other’s bodies.  “Marvelous thing about Christmas,” she said, fingers tugging at his collar.  “It does last twelve days.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
